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Scott Van Bramer, who takes care of organizing and monitoring our discussions
on Newsletter articles, shares his expertise on using the Web. Our leadoff
article by Scott combines an overall picture of what can be done using
the Web for teaching as well as some very specific examples and suggestions.

The first article in this series, Developing Web Pages
for Teaching, Part I - Introduction, discussed the basics of what a
web page can do and what might be useful. This second article talks
about the details of how you actually create a web page and put it out
there for the world to see. There are lots of different ways to do this,
and there are lots more details than I can present here. This is simply
a starting point to get you moving. It is based upon my experience teaching
other faculty how to write web pages. Many of the details will be different
for your computer system, but there should be enough information here
that you can at least talk to the technical experts at your school to
get up
and running. Good luck.

Four web sites were developed for teaching four sections of freshman
chemistry: two sites for science majors, and two sites for pre-nursing
majors. The web sites are stand-alone sites linking to WebCT for
online testing, bulletin boards discussions, email, and posting
of grades. This paper briefly describes the web site development
and some comparison of scores of students in two sections of the
same science majors' course: one was taught totally online and
one was taught totally on campus. Comparing test scores on proctored
tests in the science majors' courses, the students in the on-campus
course made better scores on the chapter testing than the students
in the online course, but the students in the online course scored
better on the final exam than the students in the on-campus course.
However, the standard deviations of the exam scores of the courses
only allows for a "no significant difference" conclusion
on the proctored test scores. The two-semester American Chemical
Society (ACS) standardized exam scores favored the online students.

Tom Chasteen is back with a review of many of the
techniques he and others have tried. Be sure to check out his links
especially to some of the best animations available for teaching
Chemistry.

 In my experience this is a relatively
common manner of adopting teaching tools: we choose the tools that
we see can provide a benefit. We try lots, discard lots, and keep
some. I don't use overhead transparencies in my classes but find
use for computer-based PowerPoint® and QuickTime® displayed
via a laptop and a projector. E-mail has proven to be something
almost indispensable in my teaching...a high speed streaming video
server has yet to prove its worth to me in my course work (and I'm
the heaviest user of computer animations and video in my department).

I rely heavily on Server-based forums (or discussion
groups) in all but my freshman and graduate courses, but so-called
virtual chat rooms or white boards just don't find a place in my
courses even though these are part of the Blackboard package. Finally,
I use white chalk but find the texture and consistency of color
chalk decidedly unappealing and frankly hard to use, so I don't.

Patty demonstrates a number of strategies that has me anxious to
get back to taking more lab photographs.

"A picture is worth a thousand words . . . "
Using a digital camera and a computer, and a few tricks, chemistry
instructors can produce and display high-quality, quick-to-load
photos on their web sites. This article guides the novice (or, reluctant
instructor?) through camera features, picture-taking, and photo
processing for web displays.

Harry has come up with a great article with really
useful links, AS usual I didn't even know most of these existed.

The web is an excellent alternative, since many web
pages include images. Unfortunately, it can be a discouraging job
to find the desired needle in the midst of the two billion pages
of the WWW haystack. There are, however, several resources that
can make this searching easier and more likely to be successful.

A number of features strike me when I turn on the
PowerBook ( 800 MHz G4 processor with Velocity Engine, 1GB memory)
next to my 20 inch monitor connected to the desktop system.. The 15.2
in diagonal PowerBook screen looks to be similar in size to the 20
in monitor. The PowerBook is 5.5 lbs complete with a much smaller
footprint.